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Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

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Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#631

Post by drzaiusx11 »

eloisant wrote: post #620
Sahhaese wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

We never got an instant messaging that works like email, for one.

matrix is exactly this, at least from an client/server interop standpoint. email is the first massively successful federated application. matrix just needs an easy to use client/webclient. Riot.im is close, but needs some UX love.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#632

Post by nwalker85 »

hackerpacker wrote: post #605
granshaw wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no money to be made in creating and building on open protocols. Without money to be made there’s no funding. Without funding there’s no way to create great experiences. Without great experiences nobody will use the thing. Pretty straightforward, really

On the other hand, I don't think anyone accused slack, with multi-megabyte webpages and even worse mobile app, of being a great experience. I think I used it once, and said no more.

I'm not sure what about the experience you had a concern about. Slack is the de facto user experience standard right now, with everyone from discord to teams copying it.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#633

Post by efficax »

HHalvi wrote: post #341

I think Slack is a bit undervalued more than over valued. The market is big enough for Slack + Microsoft, Amazon Chime, G Suite and so many other players to coexist. Also Slack to me feels like a good enough messaging apps. P.S: I hate it's knock-knock chime when engrossed in work and the fact that i have to keep the app running to get notifications.

You do know you can change the chime?

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#634

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

baby wrote: post #325
Roritharr wrote: post #5

Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.

Agree. About the breaking the law thing though: it's a B2B. Most "breaking the law" companies seem to be B2C.

Advertising companies like Facebook make their revenue by selling to advertisers, not individuals- they are emphatically a B2B company.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#635

Post by mciancia »

zimbatm wrote: post #561
Sahhaese wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

Except people still release protocols. Just look at https://matrix.org/ IRC is an early protocol and wasn't designed for extensibility purposes. A new chat protocol just needs to replace it.

Sad thing is that matrix is not working really well

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#636

Post by Shorel »

antirez wrote: post #488

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

I think Discord is more a replacement of IRC than Slack could ever be.

Slack is enterprise and workflow-oriented, Discord is community oriented.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#637

Post by rtkwe »

aeternus wrote: post #274
rtkwe wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the Slack bot integration provide a better moat. If they can get orgs using a lot of bots for CI reporting, etc switching gets more difficult at least. Not sure how many teams get that tightly integrated with bots though.

Notifications are easy, do many companies really use more advanced bots?

I don't really know I've been at the same company for a while and we've only used Skype for Business and before that Sametime for our chat infrastructure. I've seen a couple articles written about making them but not sure how many people actually use similar bots with the ability to kick things off or change things.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#638

Post by dthedev »

jumbopapa wrote: post #559
Myrmornis wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. You need to explain a claim like that. On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?

The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.

It's never been awful for me. Even when running it on an iPhone 6S, it has always been nice and responsive.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#639

Post by robohoe »

baby wrote: post #325
Roritharr wrote: post #5

Well deserved. Their product-vision was clear, their execution focused on what mattered... and they didn't need to bend or break laws to succeed. It's easily my favorite unicorn of the past decade.

Agree. About the breaking the law thing though: it's a B2B. Most "breaking the law" companies seem to be B2C.

Probably because there is money to be made from advertising/sharing user data and human customers don't have the money to see you like businesses.

Re: Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation

#640

Post by iamtheworstdev »

pcurve wrote: post #626

Even after nice runup in recent months, Atlassian with its diverse portfolio of products is only worth $32B. Which one is overvalued?

Probably Atlassian. It's not the quantity of products so much as the desire to use them and their establishment as the product to use for a given purpose. Slack doesn't have that many competitors that are as useful. Whereas Atlassian has a lot of products no one has ever heard of and a lot of competitors other people have heard of.
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